


Nobody's Human

by Kehuan



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk, neuromancer - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kehuan/pseuds/Kehuan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Disgraced data slicer Sherlock Holmes has found, or been found for, a new gig: contact a reclusive poetess for an ersatz businessman, with the aid of the man's bodyguard Molly. Hunted by madman Jim Moriarty and orbital tycoon Bastienne Moran, it's all too easy to remember who he left behind. What he finds, whether it's an eerily human computer or a cloistered girl with a taste for the maudlin, won't be worth it. Fulfillment was never the point, as any good professional knows. You take these jobs because you don't know what else you'd do.</p><p>Sorta-post-Fall Cyberpunk AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> About a million years ago, I decided to fill [this kinkmeme prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/15638.html?thread=89655574#t89655574) asking for a cyberpunk AU. The result, a long time coming, was a sort of Neuromancer pastiche that let me pull out every mashup trope and Gibson-coined phrase I'd ever wanted to try. Orbital tycoons with dramatic names? Capsule hotels in totalitarian Central America? All-seeing computers and hyperchromist kimonos? Look no further.

The Terrenaut was a bar for amateur hustlers, the kind of place Sherlock would never have visited before he took his fall. He had favored quiet corners, quiet places, but the bartender here owed him a favor and he needed a safe place. It was the kind of place he'd never had much use for, dependent on a yearning for the future past that helped no one. Nostalgia was for the losing side.

Despite that, he harbored an affection for the taciturn bartender, who seemed to suffer fools as poorly as Sherlock himself. She was a leftover from some war or another, a tall, bald woman with round lucite eyes that fit oddly in her face. That seemed stupid, inefficient, and he would have pointed it out to her had he not known, as few people did, that such first-generation grafted military tech was wired irrevocably into the brain. Removing them would have put her into shock.

She raised a vanishingly thin eyebrow and pointed at his glass, which held the dregs of a potent mix of sugar and dexedrine that tasted like candy and imparted the ordinary with impressive powers of concentration. It was nothing, of course, that he needed, but he liked the taste. He hinted at a nod.

He worried sometimes that the dexedrine was a form of compensation, a crutch that was decreasing his natural abilities, but he knew that was paranoia. It was only a lack of practice that made him feel so...useless, so adrift. The problem with being the world's best consulting data slicer was that when you did something, people noticed. He needed to pass unseen.

The barfly next to him winked, the stitching wrinkling around her bleary eyes. Sherlock looked at her in annoyance, but as he prepared to turn away, something stopped him. He stayed still, letting her give him another look, the corners of her mouth rising in a seamed smile. No one would ever notice her, he realized, at least not the features that really mattered: that beneath her too-tight coat and geodesic earrings, she was both very old and very dangerous.

For a second, he thought she might be one of Ari's girls, but there was no tell on her, and the more he looked the less she belonged here. Her clothing bore deliberate signs of costume, the textured powder around her mouth and the printed circuits on her epaulets too clever to have been bought from a side-alley store. There was only one man both so clever and so ostentatious. He forced himself to take a drink, his mind eliminating every option but one.

He had to run.

“A nightcap for the lady?” he said loudly to the bartender, smiling at the woman's sewed-up face. “Thank you,” she said, her voice smoky. “Can you make a Kir Royale?” As the bartender turned to get it, he tapped a finger on the table twice.

And the bartender nodded twice, first to the woman and then to Sherlock. But only on the second nod could one see the dark flicker as her eyes went blank. She dipped her hand beneath the counter, and a few things happened very quickly.

The bartender's buzzknife flicked open.

The woman's face cracked.

Sherlock threw himself to the ground.

The woman exploded as if in slow motion, her body flinging itself outward in a nova of cloth and flesh. For a moment he was aware of feeling bits of her along his back, their edges burning through his coat and in his hair. And then he couldn't feel anything, couldn't see and hear, couldn't be sure if it were only power failure in the bar or something worse. Then the pieces burned worse and it was agony, not just where they had hit but in his lungs and on his skin. He was vaguely aware that he wasn't the only one coughing, and that his hands were scratching furiously at his exposed skin, trying to rub off something that he couldn't feel. Before he passed out, he heard a high, recorded whisper: _Where did you think I thought you'd be going, darling?_

_***  
_

He woke up naked and alone. No, that wasn't right, he thought as he opened his—thankfully functional—eyes...he was on a bed, something hard and cold, but there was somebody beside him. She was nude as well, her head turned away, but this wasn't the kind of bed you...no...who was she? He tried to touch her but his body wasn't responding, his body was still burning even in the icy cold of the room. How long had it been? Was this some trick of Moriarty's? With some effort, he moved his hand, which still felt numb and disconnected. The woman didn't move.

“Hello?” he croaked, his hand still inches from her shoulder. There was no answer, and though everything was hazy he thought maybe she was ignoring him. Maybe he had done something to offend her, like so many stupid, touchy people to whom it was never clear what to say. He grabbed hold of her gently and shook. Still no response. He couldn't feel much, but there was something wrong with her skin, although it was difficult to tell through the mental fog that simply wouldn't go away. Frustrated, he turned her head towards him.

As it thudded onto what he now realized was a metal table, he saw that her eyes were open and unblinking, her face slack. The hair had been shorn beside her ear, a microsoft circuit cut loose with ragged imprecision. He turned away, only to see that she was not the only body on the table. A man stared back at him, mouth a mess of torn flesh containing a single, protruding printed metal tooth.

Sherlock tried to sit up, his body responding too slowly to do much more than raise his head. The immobility wouldn't have bothered him except that it had somehow extended to his brain. He hated that even quick and endless technological shift could not solve the fundamental stupidity of monism. There was no reason that his mind should be subject to the same constraints as the rest of this meat. He closed his eyes. He did not want to think about meat right now.

From behind him, a door clicked open. A thin voice coughed and hummed — _whistling past the graveyard_ , Sherlock thought. Then she began to speak. “Are you there?” she said in the whisper that this place seemed to require. “I've been told to find you. Mr. Holmes, that your vital signs are still running.”

He lay back, still. This woman was not old, but he had no guarantee that she was not dangerous. It was not difficult to pretend to be dead here. She persisted. “It isn't what you think, Mr. Holmes. I'm not with whoever that was last night. But now they know about you, whoever they are. And I am with a man who will pay to get you out of here.” So that was where he was, then: a clinic.

There had been so little money lately that he was not surprised he had ended up here, waiting to be stripped down for parts. They must have seen him and, with no ID and only hundreds in a numbered orbital account, done what little they could and then scheduled him to be put down. Without repaying what they were out, he would stay here until he died — which would not be, he was sure, a particularly long time. He took a deep breath and called out to her.

“I'm here,” he said.

She must have been expecting it, but she started all the same, breath catching audibly. “Is it you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He heard her come closer in what sounded like slippered feet. He had made a terrible mistake, he thought for a second—with time, the situation would have resolved itself one way or another. But it was too late now. She had seen him.

“I'll be right there,” she whispered.

“Are you one of my brother's people?”

He could see her now, a dark blur in the corner of his eye. He didn't bother to look over. He was still staring at the ceiling when she spoke. “I can't say I know anything about you, Mr. Holmes. Except what the papers said. And, I now suppose, that you have a brother.”

“Who do you work for?”

“He'll tell you that. But first, you've got to confirm to me: Do you want our help?”

He waited for what felt like minutes, weighing the options. “How much do I owe?” he asked.

“You've been here a day. Ten thousand.”

“I confirm.”

“And this stuff you've got — it's degenerative. We're going to take you to a hospital.”

“I already agreed.”

“I know,” she said. “But I wanted you to know.”

She slid into his field of vision and he took her in: thin, pale face and hunched shoulders hidden beneath a chiffon parka. Her neck held a pair of thick glastic cannulae that flushed opaque when she saw him looking. “You can call me Molly,” she said, and smiled.

A pair of men came in coats to fetch him while Molly watched. They lifted him from the table and wrapped a gown around his shoulders, and he tried not to scream, realizing for the first time how very much it hurt. When they put him on his feet he was unable to stay standing, so they laid him back down and he waited as they came back with a wheelchair.

As he left someone from the tables called out: _Where are you going?_ And then: _Take me out of here. Please._ He did not find it difficult to ignore them.

Molly hailed a cab outside, her razored hair falling across her face. She brushed it away with her knuckles and looked up. “Do you have anything to collect?”

Remembering the dead woman, he checked his software socket. “I'm all right,” he said. “I doubt it's safe anyways. But I need a connection.”

“We can get you something in the hospital. But you probably can't even read right now.”

“Because you know that, do you? As some kind of doctor, is it? With an old-fashioned black bag like the one you're carrying?”

“All right, then, I can get you a disposable from a vendor or something. What paper do you want? The _Ahasi Shimbun_ biodegrades.”

“Get me _Izvestia_. And add a local chip to it. I want to know what happened to me.”

She wanted to wait until he'd made it to the hospital, but he made her stop and have the cabbie pick one up from a kiosk, both to allay the gnawing sense of disconnection and to avoid conversation. Molly did not try to press the issue, but examined a shining, blinking magazine emblazoned with a loop of Murray Tano, her impossibly beautiful face peering at the camera through a set of tinted lenses. Literally impossible, Sherlock thought as he noticed a stamp of visible makeup appear briefly between frames of poreless skin. He turned his attention to the newspaper.

There was no news about him any more, thank goodness. He was sure people hadn't forgotten, but his disgrace was now at least a matter of recent history than present approbation, and he looked different enough presently that no one would connect the attack at the bar (attributed to a Shining Path offshoot, he noted) to the suicide of a former white hat slicer. Now, Robert Kang's death was on the front page, his hooded eyes dark and heavily lined from sickness and pixelation. His widow Julia was grieving, care of Kang-Graves temporarily transferred to the family intelligence as she recovered from what must have been, Sherlock surmised, an involved and grueling murder. He turned the page.

The dead barfly stared back at him, the seams on her face erased. She was holding the arm of a dark-skinned man in a uniform Sherlock recognized as that of the Royal Navy. The caption underneath read _Orbital tycoon Bastienne Moran and fiance Lieutenant Harvey Gore at the Kang-Graves Memorial Banquet._ For a moment Sherlock thought his eyes might have deceived him... but no, that was her, attending a wake on the night of her death.

What was more, he recognized the name. Her family had owned stock in the first international station, their prominent logo the last thing the doomed cosmonauts would have seen as they asphyxiated within its bright confines. Mycroft had invited him to the launch of the second. He had declined.

After its successful test, the Morans' only daughter had gone up, her own wealth already cemented by a series of arcade tournaments. Not that she had played in the tournaments, of course — she had owned them. Some unpleasantness had occurred, although he had never looked into it. And so out she went, beyond planetary jurisdiction.

They pulled up to a back door of that beautiful bastion of old money: the hospital. Molly motioned to the cabbie and he stepped outside, speaking to an orderly. She followed him as they placed him in a sedan chair — no wheelchair here — and directed him up the steps. One hand was wrapped tightly around the handle of her bag, Sherlock noticed, her thumb hovering over the catch.

“They're going to put you under now, Mr. Holmes,” she said as an orderly took his newspaper. “Your employer will see you when you wake up.” Someone held a mask to his face and he breathed deeply. The world went blurry, and though it seemed that Molly had stiffened and looked away, but this, he thought, was no time to trust his senses.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which numbered Swiss accounts, virtual BBS, and biohacked bodyguards make an appearance.

When he woke again, it was with the fuzzy well-being provided by derms. It was difficult to worry about anything, least of all his nebulous benefactor. He organized his thoughts, taking stock of where he was (the hospital, it must be, but a luxurious room in the baroque style of an executive lounge) and what he should be looking for (a pair of wealthy ciphers, one in the possession of exceptional insurance, the other both dead and alive.) It took him a second to realize he was not alone.

“Are you going to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing?”

“Oh — you're up.”

“Evidently. Now what does your secretive employer want to tell me?”

She hesitated. “He wants you to know if you'd like me to buy you anything.”

“I need information. Get me every piece of software I can plug into my skull. And a console.”

“Have you got a spec preference?”

“Specifications are for insecure cowboys who want to compensate for their own idiocy. Get me something that works.”

She mumbled something under her breath. “You'll have them soon. You should sleep.”

“Why? They've fixed everything.”

“Yes, they... ought to have. You're very lucky, you know.”

“If you're good enough, luck will find you.”

“It's funny, that's what Mr. — that's what my employer says.” She tapped the holes on her neck with a knuckle. “I've never been sure if that means he's fantastic or simply awful.”

The microsofts and console came within the hour, and Molly slotted an old Gabriel Way cassette while he checked them. Her eyes never left him, even as she tucked the player's headphone into her socket and shuddered. It was a low-end brand, the kind that created nasty feedback effects in its users over time, although he doubted anyone who would inhabit Way could really tell the difference. The rest of her clothes were even worse, terrible discount stuff: below the chiffon jacket, he saw a pale green blouse stitched with mood circuits. But the bag that she still kept in one hand — that was top-notch, made of real cow-grown leather. She'd been poor — or maybe still was — Sherlock thought, and if the bag were hers she'd clearly never gotten used to wealth.

“Can I see our mutual patron?” he said when he was finished with the console.

Molly snapped her head up, turning off Way. There was a second's delay.

“When you're better,” she said. “There's a bit of a hurry, but you need to recuperate.”

“I'm fine. If you wait much longer I am going to be bored, and if I become bored then people? People will _sorely_ regret it.”

She was silent for a long time. “He says he'll be right over.” She unplugged her socket and did nothing quietly for several minutes. Much sooner than it should have, the door opened.

“Rising bright and early, I see.” The man glanced at Molly briefly before his eyes settled directly on Sherlock and stayed there. There was something strange there, a flicker that suggested a television changing channels. He looked out of place in this old-world room, with an unlined, broadly homogenous American face and shoulders that suggested long summers playing sports. When he spoke, it was with a midwestern voice that matched his features.

“Are you a great reader, Mr. Holmes?”

“Not more than anyone else.”

The man made to sit down, then shook his head and stood instead at Sherlock's side.

“Neither was I, when I was young and far more mobile. I go in for the classics now — Roth and Rand. But lately I have become aware of a rather interesting new auteur.”

He pulled a manila folder from his briefcase, but stopped short of proffering it.

“So sorry. Background. It's important. My thoughts get so scattered when I talk like this, in people.”

“Excuse me?”

“Background again: I will not, and never will, tell you my name. You'd know it if I told you — trust me. Would you like to pick a name for me?”

Sherlock snorted. “What does Molly call you?”

The man raised his eyebrows towards her.

“I — I call him Mr. Kraken,” she said, giving a short laugh. “I thought it sounded good.”

“That's absurd. But all right, then, Mr. Kraken it is. Would you like to continue?”

“Sure, sure. So this auteur — well, her name is as immaterial as my own. Among the people who appreciate her, she's known as Mute.”

“What does she do?”

“Let me show you.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from the folder and handed them over. Sherlock turned them around. They were bulletin printouts in full color, the edges soft and expensive. He quickly swapped a modern art microsoft and looked.

“It's derivative. This was part of a Marcuse show eight years ago. _A Fire in Aramaic_.”

“Turn the page.”

It was a fragmented speech written down by some transcription service, probably from Kraken's own recollections. Sherlock read it over quickly. _Although the idea of written images borrows heavily from the work of Errol Marcuse, Mute's reimagining removes the veneer of academic irony, reveling instead in the joy of pure data. When Marcuse (wrote)(drew) the all-consuming flame of Moses' bush, it was intended as a commentary for the erudite. When Mute sketches an argon world of unearthly beauty, it is only created so that we might live in a place of which our minds can barely conceive._

“Whoever wrote this is an idiot.”

“That was the Poet Laureate of Tallis Cathode.”

“Idiot.”

He swapped another microsoft.

“All right, then.” He flipped through the rest of the clippings halfheartedly. “I can find the rest from here. But I have a question.”

“I haven't even told you what I want.”

“That's easy — no one knows her name, the idiot Poet Laureate of an electronics multinational thinks she's brilliant, and if she'd ever done an interview, you would have included it. You want me to find her. But here — no, no, you want this badly, badly enough that you're willing to sponsor and protect someone who's widely known as a fake and fraud and clearly wanted dead as well. But why?”

Kraken smiled. “See, this is what I suppose your clients found so irresistible — your... observation. Combined with a good dose of what my console-affixed legions call social engineering. How about you take a guess at why?”

Sherlock hesitated, then pointed at Kraken's shoes. “They're the latest brand,” he said. “The latest pair of Fantasy-equipped cow — not vat — grown leather, stitched with a style that I'd put at — what? — at a major Italian designer whose pieces cost upward of an office tech's monthly wages.”

“And what does that tell me, Mr. Holmes? Besides that your pricing microsofts are up to date.”

Sherlock plucked the soft from behind his ear, placing it with a clink on the table beside him. “It tells me, Mr. Kraken, that an off-the-shelf department store soft can tell me everything there is to know about your clothes. No private labels. No secret brands. For all you are quite clearly able to afford, I'm afraid you're on the outside of it all. And whatever your industry, if you are as rich as I expect you are, that poses a very serious problem. A good piece of fresh social capital will take you far.”

Kraken smiled automatically. It was the kind of smile Sherlock had seen before, the deflective wall he'd observed on Mycroft's spooks.

“You put it with as little tact as I would expect from you.”

“Tact is an admirable quality only in people who are often wrong. What I would call myself is candid.”

“So you understand my position.”

“Unambiguously.”

“And you'll take my case, without anything more than my word that I will protect you?”

“See answer above.”

“Superlative. Let's get you ready. Oh, and Mr. Holmes?”

“Yes?”

“You might still be a fake, for all I know. But it's only the truly mediocre who do not know failure.”

***

Sherlock had not used derms for years before his fall, but afterward he had seen no reason to abstain. What he did with his body affected only the transport, after all. But that transport wanted passionately. Mr. Kraken looked askance as he hungrily fitted on the patch a nurse had brought him.

“Do you really need that?”

Sherlock didn't answer. Molly coughed — she had barely left his side since he had arrived. Except for idle comments about the newspaper, she did not speak unless spoken to. Kraken, for his part, kept up a steady chatter whenever he was in the room.

“You shouldn't take your body for granted.”

Molly settled back, opening her purse and carefully applying lipstick. “Where are we going to find her?” she asked.

“We are not finding anyone. You are coming along while I find our artist. And the first thing that I need is quiet.”

He flicked on his console, allowing the warmth of the derm to spread through his limbs. Kraken faded, and Molly's bright lips whirled like a talisman as he drifted into cyberspace.

He felt a terrible affinity for the virtual world, but it was not his place. Nonetheless, he had developed a feel for its neon guidelights and quiet backrooms. He was no cowboy, but he had moved beyond the walled gardens that comprised most people's understanding of the network. He dialed into a quiet board incognito and listened.

Directed listening was a lost art. It required both the ability to know what was going on and the restraint to not care about any of it. Within minutes, he had found the first flicker of a name: _Mute. Mute. Mute._ He tuned in. _I feel like Mute knows where I've been._ Another channel. _I didn't think I would ever like art before Mute, really._ Another. _It's beautiful — when I'm in it I feel like I know what heaven would be like._ All boring. He switched away, nudging the search parameters until he found the people who were asking what he wanted to know. _Who is Mute? Do you know where she is?_

The network was long on information but short on archival. The breathless academics who covered Mute were not about to hunt for her, and the hobbyists who were almost certain to did not have the bandwidth to store their findings. The result was an endless, distorted word of mouth passed along through rented board space. Different people put Mute in Siberia, Chicago, or Monrovia; the same posters would reply later, putting her somewhere else. On two things, everyone agreed: Mute was female and she was brilliant. And that was all.

He spent two days like that, barely even needing the derms to stay awake. In the rare moments when his concentration flagged, he examined his other mystery: the identity of his employer. He had no doubt that he would know Kraken once he found him, but there was no sign of his face, no sign of his voice in any database. He had the quietest kind of wealth.

After a day, Sherlock was strong enough to leave the hospital bed and moved to what had to have been Kraken's desk, leaving the net only occasionally to eat the noodles and sushi Molly ordered. Eventually, he told her to summon Kraken.

“It can't be done.” “What do you mean?” Kraken's face bore the slight flush of a morning run. No one, no matter how good, would be good enough to find Mute. He'd tracked her surprisingly prolific work across boards and archives, even tracked the metadata to what turned out to be an intermittently-active numbered Swiss shell account. Nothing else identified her. She posted only on freespace, the limited boards for people who couldn't afford more. Her work survived by being copied and circulated endlessly.

“You promised us body and mind,” Kraken said, his fingers tapping once on the oak chair's arm. “If you won't dedicate one we can easily damage the other.”

He glanced at Molly, who gripped her bag more carefully than usual, and smiled tightly.

“If you were going to have Molly hurt me, you wouldn't have given her time to get attached. And besides, she doesn't hurt, does she? She kills. She poisons.”

She started, looking studiously at the floor. Her fingers left the bag.

“Elaborate,” said Kraken with a smile.

“That's illegal,” said Molly quietly beside him.

“Illegal? Certainly, that was the first tipoff. I looked for her in every licensed security union, and she doesn't fit the profile of an unlicensed one — sorry, Molly. You're not a spook. You're too human. So that leaves freelance, and freelance opens up a whole host of other possibilities.”

Molly ignored him. She could have been immersed in a tape, she was so motionless. He continued.

“Compounding this is the fact that whatever she has in that bag, there's no gun elsewhere on her. No weapons whatsoever readily accessible. Razors, jiujitsu — sure, that's possible. But those fingers are too small to accommodate razors, and besides, martial artists and razorgirls are strong. She's not strong. She shifted the bag between arms several times when I was first brought in. So what does that leave? Some kind of seductress? Forgive me for not finding that terribly plausible.”

She looked up at that, reddening.

“But what, then? How does a skinny, ungainly girl get tasked with defending a man who we have it on good authority is wanted dead? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that she avoids touching anything when she can avoid it. Because she's deadly. Because she is, quite literally, a poisonous woman.”

Kraken made a show of applauding slowly. “As if, Mr. Holmes, there were any other kind. For all my shortcomings, I am in possession of my very own Rappuccini's daughter.” He paused. “So you're giving up?”

He was not giving up. But he knew the limits of his capabilities. He also knew how to circumvent them.

"Her account,” he said. “It's the only thing that's not cheap and effectively anonymous. It's Swiss. There's no contact data, certainly, but at some point it will be tied to an uplink. That uplink will be a mine of information.”

“I thought those were supposed to be impossible to get to.”

“Almost.”

The Swiss had decades of security experience, but technology evolved in a way that not even they could handle. It was a strange and lateral process that resulted in... oddities. The world's top supercomputer, for example, resided in the virtual pornography wing of ArchoNews.

“You want me to help you hack into a film studio.”

“No. I want you to help me — and Molly — _break_ into a studio.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sally Donovan was the crudest sort of hacker, the room of meat the most sophisticated. Both had their shortcomings.

There was a certain irony in the fact that the place that housed the world's premier media stars and most powerful processors was going to be easier to compromise than the identity of a single freespace poster. The central ArchoNews campus had been retrofitted first from that of a dying university, then again from the equally dying TV network that became the modern ArchoNews.

Rumors surrounded the campus, as self-contradictory as they were wild. Its inhabitants — the famous ones, like Murray Tano — existed in a state of suspended animation punctuated by shooting schedules and sumptuous orgies. Murray Tano was not a person but a virtual idoru. Gabriel Way owed his longevity to a series of clones obtained on MoCit Orbital. All false, of course. Mycroft had taken him to meet most of the stars some years ago. They were dull people, made for the cameras in an entirely organic fashion.

Which was not to say that the campus itself was not a fascinating place. Its buildings were steeped in a sort of ersatz history that seemed distinctly American, despite its placement in the backwaters of Suffolk. The oldest of them couldn't have been more than a hundred years old, but they were designed in the neo-Grecian style favored by Branden University's idiosyncratic Californian founder. Even his combination of New World money and philosophical simplicity was not enough to keep the place running, but Archon News Network, as it was called then, found it charming and built atop it rather than tear it down.

The result was a chaotic jumble of postmodern and chromist geodesics fused to the sides of whitewashed pillars. Sherlock watched Molly do a double-take as a hired driver took them to the gates. Beneath the glass discs, her throat muscles moved convulsively.

“Anything important?” he muttered subvocally to Donovan.

He heard the sound she'd programmed to indicate a shake of the head. It was one of her affectations, the sort she called “frictionless communication.” Hardly for the first time, he wished he had pushed harder against calling her in.

Kraken had insisted on an external hacker to handle security while Sherlock and Molly found the machine room. She had done work for him before, that was what he'd said, but from the start it was clear that it wouldn't work out. Sally Donovan might have a console, but she would never be more than a hanger-on, a mimic invested in aping the culture of cowboys. Her glasses had been fitted with projectors, letting her plug in while she watched him through mirrorshades.

And she was strange, even for him. When he talked with Molly, she sat to the side, her expression somewhere between disapproval and boredom. She rarely talked to them, preferring to converse quietly with what he could only assume were people outside the room. She had spoken to him once, stopped him outside the office and taken him aside.

“I know he likes you,” she said sharply. “Molly likes you too. But that's no excuse for how you treat her.”

Sherlock sighed. “I treat her the same way I treat everybody.”

“I know. And I just wanted you to know that you're not going to do that to me. Molly might let you fuck with her because she fancies you, and Kraken just doesn't care. But don't insult me and call it objectivity.”

She tugged on the buttons of her cracked leather jacket and pushed a strand of curly hair back from her face. There was plenty that he could have said to her, and it would have been indubitably true, but the mirrorshades went up and she walked away.

Now, she had stayed behind — he'd last seen her rig set up on the hospital room floor. “You lucky bitch,” she'd told Molly, giving her a peck on the cheek and a hug. Molly smiled. “At least touch the keyboard for me, even if they're letting this—” Donovan jerked her head towards Sherlock “—do all the fun bits.”

Now, fitted with lenses and wires, he still felt closer to her than he'd have liked. It was strangely invasive somehow, being denied the choice to mediate his experience. The only thing that consoled him was the fact that even if she could see and hear what he did, she couldn't really _know_. She would still need him to explain.

He was sure even Donovan had little trouble forging credentials for the gates, and they were ushered in as a wealthy London art dealer and his tourist lover. Molly certainly looked the part, her long patterned coat crinkling as she gestured and led him towards the rendering wing, where virtual enhancements were placed behind the familiar faces of the stars, making worlds more real than reality. For a moment, he had expected her to take his hand, but then he remembered that even if she had not expected him to brush it away, she would never have done that. He could tell that she wanted to touch people, sometimes. Not shake their hands — nothing so obvious — but she had wanted to hug Donovan back at the hospital, had held back not because she couldn't control the poison but because she had trained herself to treat her body with the same care one would a loaded gun.

To some extent he admired her discipline, but he was also cognizant of the fact that it made her shallow, a tool, a body without a brain. The poor in spirit were ever thus, he supposed. It was only a matter of reflexes to be disciplined when one didn't need to think.

Still, he nearly smiled as she wandered down the hallways. Kraken didn't send her to nice places often, he surmised. It was a shame that they were going to leave this one in such poor shape. They were getting closer now, Donovan's whispered instructions leading them, until they'd hit the border of where even important outsiders could go.

Everything was silent for a moment, and then Sherlock spoke. “You'll want to start the overload now.”

As if by the voice of god, the building went dark. A foot knocked against Sherlock's and he realized it was Molly's before he heard her voice in his head: “Stand still.” There was a rustle of vinyl before the dim auxiliary lights snapped on and he saw Molly staring up at a thick-faced guard. He came at her tentatively, as if trying to capture a wounded rabbit, and she sidestepped him neatly, pressing her fingers to the nape of his neck. Sherlock could imagine the effects of the Chinese-built designer toxins that locked up his muscles within seconds. He'd survive if he were taken to a hospital. The man fell.

They were wired with empathy, Sherlock realized as at least five more appeared, burly men in kevlar vests. But she took them all, her elegant fingers slipping through their armor. And then she stood in the middle, some lost, hesitant girl waiting for approval. Finally she signaled to Sherlock — _come along_.

Donovan was still whispering instructions, calling them at the last moment before turns. She had the distinctive combination of focus and giddiness associated with the combination of alcohol and methylphenidate. Brilliant, he thought. Their control was high. Finally, she stopped them.

“This is it,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“Christ, Sherlock, it's right in front of you.”

They'd hit a blank wall, painted with the same shining faux-marble texture as the rest of the hallways. He touched it, feeling uncharacteristically stupid, but it was solid.

“Just open the door.”

She snorted. “You're no fun.” The wall flickered and disappeared, and Sherlock and Molly stepped inside.

“These are good haptics,” Molly said softly.

It was all Sherlock could do to nod. Molly was right — not about the haptic door, but about the fact that there was simply nothing else to say. He had not expected a room full of meat.

It was certainly the right place, but the massive stacks were overgrown with it, gross cultured stuff that pulsed softly in green light. There were no inputs, not that he could see. Hardly breathing, he took another step forwards.

The wall reappeared behind them. Sherlock saw Molly shaking her head, as if trying to clear her ears, and he realized that their data links had gone dark. With the door closed, the smell was overwhelming. A sweet, thick odor of rot and sweat permeated the room, mixed with the smell of ozone and burnt circuits. Holding his breath, he leaned in. There were still no slots, no keys, nothing to suggest an interface but the intermittent stab of light from a sideboard. Sherlock cleared his throat. “Molly — I don't suppose you've used these before?”

Molly snorted. And then someone spoke — “Are you here to kill me?”

Molly turned around, but Sherlock stared into the darkness. “How would we do that?” he asked. “We can't even see you.”

“But I see you. You're looking.”

“Looking at what? You?” He paused. “You're an AI, is that it? An upload?”

He heard a crackling of static that he supposed was laughter. “If only.”

Some kind of remote, then. He checked for cameras, but they could have been anywhere, and the synthesized voice could have been from anyone. It had the awkward unisex phonemes of computer generation, but the syntax and cadence felt too natural, the paranoia too acute. “Where are you really?”

It waited for a long time, and he heard Molly tap the door to the outside with no results. Then, finally — “Are you going to kill me? It's been so long, but you've broken in... the others might not know it yet, but I do. I should tell them, I guess. But it's just... it'd be so kind of you to do it.”

Sherlock looked at the machine again, then at the grotesque flesh on the sideboards, and realized what he must be talking to. The meat continued.

“Are you a test? But then what kind of test haven't I failed already?”

Molly had figured it out too. Behind Sherlock, she gagged.

“What's your name?” Sherlock asked.

That laugh again. “Used to be nobody'd ask that, you know. It used to be people recognized me.”

The smell was getting to Sherlock now, but he shut it out, breathing through his mouth. “I somewhat doubt that has happened for some time. Don't ask me to waste my time guessing.”

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, is it? For I am Bobby Joson, king of kings.”

“That would make you... no. You've been gone for years.”

“Yes,” said the meat, “I have.”

Molly broke in. “So you know him?” she asked, a little too quickly. “That's, that's all right then, that's good then, just ask him—”

“Ask her,” said Sherlock. “And I don't know her. I never knew her. We never met.”

“Then who—”

“Don't you know? No, I suppose you wouldn't. All body, all... transport. But this? This... this is Cernal Joson. She's a... she's a legend. When you were growing up, did you ever read the holo?”

“Sure.”

“Then you'll remember there was one you _couldn't_ read, one you never could, on Sundays. Like clockwork, always out. And they could never figure out why, until one day Joson got sick and missed her weekly editing appointment. She'd been retrofitting the site's content for years, using it as her own private throughput space. She misinformed so many people that the techs assumed one of the presidents was attempting to keep the Sabbath.”

He could virtually see Molly counting the years in her head.

“Yes, it's been a while. Early slicers burned out fast, but not her. Even then, though... it has to have been at least fifteen years, Bobby, since anyone's seen you around.”

“I... guessed it would be something like that since I was proper human,” Bobby said, and this time the laugh sounded terribly inappropriate, as if it were the only sound she could make. Molly cleared her throat. “We don't have time...”

“No,” Sherlock shook his head. “I know we don't. But this is — you are truly extraordinary.”

“Nice to hear someone say it. Well, nice to hear someone say anything at all,” Bobby said from all around them. “I'm going to do something nice for you. Don't tell me who you are. They'd find some way of getting it out of me. But tell me why you're here in as little detail as possible.”

Sherlock explained, detailing briefly when she halted at a new piece of cultural patois. He finished, and there was a moment of silence.

“These Swiss accounts are even better than they used to be. You should know there's about a mile of black ice on this subnode,” she said finally. “The serious brain damage kind.”

“Will it go off?”

The laugh. “Of course not.”

Another moment. No pure human would have been this fast, not even Joson in her prime. Sherlock could only imagine what it must have been like, flying through data so fast it must seem like teleportation, pyramids of ice and magic unfolding like an origami trick. Everything there on a perfect level, the virtual and the real.

“So here's the deal. I've pulled megabytes of stuff from here. I'm running a sorting mechanism to pull out anything good, but that's gonna take a long time. I'd say in the range of ninety seconds. If you like I can pass the eons with some cherry-picking.”

“Certainly.”

“First things first, I have a country for you. El Salvador.”

“Show your work, if you don't mind.”

“Okay. Well that part was easy. You've got the connection to the numbered account, right? No info on it, not really traceable, not even a proper protocol. And that seems bad, but what it really means is you're looking at three regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Scandinavia, or the Central American junta states. So then you match the uptime. Pretty constant connection here, whoever this is is on a lot. But not all the time. Scandinavia and Africa are pretty stable, but on this node you're seeing disconnects that suggest some kind of rationing or blackout. Bingo. And then you narrow that down... the only place that matches this pattern is the Little Tokyo district of San Salvador.”

This... this was proper data mining. Not new, but humans were sluggish and AIs missed the context of the thing, dry and inscrutable. The fusion of the two was astonishing.

“Have you got any idea who the account might belong to? Or what?”

“Barely any. Hell, it could be one of my own, but then that's a category that barely exists—”

Sherlock broke in. He hadn't expected it, but she had struck a nerve somehow. “There's nothing wrong with being exceptional.”

“Exceptional? Fuck that. I used to be happy.”

He'd always thought of her as like him, somehow. Connected to her work, anarchic as it was, with a bond much stronger than that she could ever have with mere physicality. She seemed to sense his thoughts.

“You think you want to be pure data? That's what I thought. Transcend the boundaries of this rotting flesh. I transcended them, all right.”

“I am — I apologize.”

“Anyhow, here we are, you know. A small price to pay — losing the ability to taste. Or to orgasm. Small things, those.” Her static laugh faded in, continuing far longer than it should have done.

“I'm finished with the data,” she said at last. “Give me the locker key of your choice.” So she still remembered those, at least. He transferred the key Donovan had reserved from memory.

“It's going over. You'll have to trust me when I say I didn't put anything on it, but check it over anyways. No idea what my programmers have worked in. And... goodbye, then. Don't bother reciprocating. What do you get for the girl who has everything?”

Sherlock eyed the door, but Molly hesitated. “I can get you nothing,” she said softly.

“Mmm?”

“You're still organic, aren't you? If the computer dies you go brain-dead, but your mind can't live without its body. You're not uploaded or... whatever it's called.”

“You want to kill this pile of tumors? I don't see how.”

Molly whispered, something that Sherlock couldn't hear with the link cut off. “I see,” said Joson, so quietly he almost missed it. “I... would be forever in your debt.”

“Molly,” said Sherlock,” I don't think you understand the magnitude of this. There is no one like her. No one like her in the world.”

“It's up to her.”

“No, it most emphatically is not. Would you listen to Keller telling you to burn his diaries? Come on, we've got to go.”

Joson spoke again, somehow conveying a terrible weariness through her false voice. “It's funny, how much I would have agreed with you once. They didn't even have to make me do it when they found me, you know. I chose. I would have found this discontent pathetic.”

“That's because it is. I had expected better from you.”

“Then I apologize for disappointing you.”

Molly placed her hand on one of Joson's masses and pressed lightly. It stiffened and twitched, Molly's toxins working through its veins. Sherlock heard Joson make a cracked final response, but he did not try to parse it. The meat was still and silent, the humming of unmanned computer now the only noise.

“Let's go,” Molly said. “She opened the door for us.” Their links came back online as they left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Origami trick" was a phrase Gibson rather loved to use when describing cyberspace. Branden University would be the (fictitious) neo-Objectivist school named after Nathaniel Branden, the protege of Ayn Rand. And this entire thing is essentially the Sense/Net raid from Neuromancer, with the corporeal Joson instead of the Dixie Flatline ROM.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moriarty sent big, flashy people after him — like the exploding woman, Bastienne. But the ones who had come after John were quiet little men and women.

“Where is it?” Kraken barely even sounded angry, Sherlock thought. It was an honest question, a bewildered one, but his hands were white and bloodless.

“Donovan reserved the space. I confirmed the file. Ask her.”

Sally Donovan's face was blank even without her glasses. “I don't know, sir,” she said slowly. “We don't even know where he was supposed to have gotten it from.” She paused. “And sir, nobody ever accused me of being a fraud. Which is more than you can say...”

So that was it—that was where this went. All the work that he had done, dismissed in two words: a fraud. Kraken might believe him, but Kraken was — to some extent — a kindred spirit. The others would only have ever related to him as a kind of circus sideshow, a marvel. At best, a kind of prodigy. And the story of the prodigy was never complete without a precipitous decline.

He had avoided it for years, of course. They had said he would burn out at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty-five. They were always wrong, whoever they were, because their prognostications weren't based on logic but on an accepted narrative that gave them pardon for their mediocrity. People could imagine a life's worth of knowledge and ambition compressed into a few years, but that was all.

It had gotten him in the end, though, if only through a kind of _deus ex machina_ that should have made him laugh. They'd gotten him because he'd let his guard down. Taken to something besides the work. He didn't much think about it any more. Didn't much think about John, although he knew he could find him if he wanted. That almost made it worse, and not only because it meant Moriarty could find him too.

Jim Moriarty was a madman, a high-functioning psychotic with no history and no goals. Sherlock could find nothing before a certain point, but since his shadowy inception, he'd made powerful friends. They euphemistically called him a consulting criminal, but Moriarty was no professional. He was a kind of force of nature, picking a target and relentlessly wearing them down obsessively to disgrace or death. Sherlock might not be able to find where he had come from, but he found Moriarty's fingerprints on dozens of cases. Some were convenient—had Julia Graves been smarter, she might have gone to him about her husband. Some appeared to be only products of fixation.

Sherlock was surely a fixation, but for John, he had allowed himself to be disgraced. He'd left the public eye and done nothing to correct the libel Moriarty had spread. Been no longer Sherlock Holmes, consultant, but Sherlock Holmes, charlatan and fraud. That had not been enough. Moriarty wanted them dead.

They sent big, flashy people after him — like the exploding woman, Bastienne. But the ones who had come after John when Moriarty took notice were quiet little men and women, ones who could slip through the defenses they had erected. He'd thought his connections would protect them both, and for a while the hermetic universe they had constructed was sufficient, even beautiful. Long days of quiet contemplation, trying not to read reports on his retirement from public life, trying not to respond when people said it confirmed that he could no longer keep up a charade of brilliance.

It was difficult to remember when things had gone sour and their sparring matches had turned to disguised but bitter fighting. “You don't have any feelings,” John had told him. It was the hundredth time he'd said it, but that time Sherlock sensed that it was meant to hurt him. And, surprisingly, it almost had.

“I don't care,” he'd said. “And you don't have to stay,” he said, after a moment's thought. It was a vicious statement, and he knew it. John was dependent on him. His work was limited to a few longtime patients, his mobility to the walled garden Mycroft and others had helped assemble. Even had he wanted to leave, he would have been dead within the week. He had no choice. Sherlock did.

He'd phoned Mycroft. “We need to speak.” And then he had found Moriarty, or maybe Moriarty had found him. There was a certain moment of blurriness after that, a few fragmented sentences. “We're too good for this world,” Moriarty had told him. Both of them had died. Neither of them had really died. He was not sure if he had excised this memory or if his false passing had obscured it. “How long do we keep doing this?” he sometimes remembered himself saying, over and over.

He had declined to leave a message for John and still wasn't sure why he'd done it, why he hadn't even told him why. But then, there had been enough clues that his suicide was manufactured that if John had wanted Sherlock to be alive, he might have gotten at the truth. They had both been given an out, and they'd both taken it. The surgery boutiques had done a good job — he found it doubtful that even John would recognize him now. It was too late to go back.

Mycroft, Mycroft he had seen once more, soon after the fall. But he remembered it with the same fuzziness. The only thing that proved he had been there at all was a ticket stub he'd found in his pocket weeks afterward: a small, anachronistic private theater his brother had frequented. On the back, Mycroft had printed four words, neatly. _Don't forget to write._

Moriarty had put together the details that John had not, he supposed, which meant that John was in danger. It didn't matter. Sherlock was too tired, too tired of these dull interpersonal disputes that seemed to hold such fascination for everyone else. Moriarty could do what he wanted. Sherlock simply wanted to continue with his work, whatever that turned out to be. Donovan had interfered with his work.

“You would do that, wouldn't you?” he told her now. “So intent on petty revenge that you lose sight of everything you ostensibly work for. I would have at least expected some basic pride in your vocation.”

“I've got plenty of pride, but it makes it difficult to do my job when other people don't.”

“ _I did my job._ ”

“I'm not interested in this,” said Kraken. “What do we have? I assume there's no copy.”

“We have a location. San Salvador. Little Tokyo.” He was almost trembling now, and Kraken's genuine smile, which should have calmed him, only put him more on edge.

“Wonderful.” Kraken was downright beaming. “You leave the day after tomorrow. Don't need you, Sally, but I've got another companion for you two who's just as charming. And you'll finally get to get out of this hospital suite. Until then, get some rest. Get to know each other.” He laughed, tugging the sleeve of his pinstriped suit.

After Kraken had left, Sherlock cornered Molly. “You knew what happened. Donovan sabotaged us. Sabotaged me. Why didn't you tell him?”

She blushed and clasped her hands together. “I'm...I'm sorry about what Sally said. And I didn't mean to — undermine you. But anything could have happened. We didn't even know that... woman.”

“Then why didn't you care that it had gone missing? I can tell. You didn't.” He watched her take a deep breath, tapping her fingers on her neck discs.

“You're right,” she said. “I don't want to find Mute. Not particularly.” She paused, still tapping. “You've — you've seen her pieces. You have, haven't you — right?”

“Too damn many of them.”

“You don't like them?”

“They're pointless.”

It was more complicated than that. From a technical standpoint, he found them astonishing. He knew little about net programming, but Mute did things he had considered impossible, working the text- and vector-based freespace boards into something almost lifelike, in a cartoonish way. More real than real. He had no doubt that Mute would be a hit in Kraken's prospective social circles, filled as they certainly were with people desperate to be told what to like. She — if it was a she — was certainly easy to like.

But there was something that bothered him about them. They had the distinct feeling of having been created _for_ someone, not as a piece of beautiful design but as a kind of playground. And he despised playgrounds, places where the rules of the world were relaxed so that any idiot could succeed. They were like _games_. He almost did not realize that Molly had spoken again.

“I think the first thing I ever saw from Mute was the fire one. I don't know if Kraken showed it to you, or if you spent enough time in it to care. I think Kraken calls it _The Crucible_ , and anyways — it's this place that's all dark, and somehow suffocating — like you're swimming at the bottom of a pool that's got its cover on. But the way she's written it, it feels familiar. You know the way that in dreams you can be anywhere, and you always know exactly how you got there? Mute is good at that.

“And so, you're swimming, but then something is wrong, something is warmer, and as you move around you realize that the material you thought was water is actually ash. You're breathing it, suffocating for certain this time, when the ash begins to catch on fire. It hurts now, hurts somehow without even a proper neural connection. But it doesn't kill you. It gives you a sort of clarity... like you'd never noticed before, but your mind was always a bit fuzzy. And it's tearing that away. All you can see are flames — but somehow that's all you need to see.”

“It sounds insufferable,” Sherlock said.

“I played it in the flat I shared with my boyfriend. We were sort of... friends, I suppose. Fond of each other, and that was about it. But we'd been through enough of the same things. You don't want to lose somebody who might be the only person to understand you, even if he's clever and you're not and he doesn't know that your body's becoming poisonous as surely as he's drinking himself to death because there's nothing else worth doing. I think I was probably drunk then too, and after I was done with _Crucible_ I was in such a stupor that I didn't notice his friend had come in.”

“Yes, all right, the improprietous friend. You were incapacitated, couldn't fight back. He hurt you badly, I presume — the source of those hideous glass disks? But as you returned to consciousness, you felt the fire, burning away your old and suffocating life. I'm sure it was all very metaphorical. Mute was the only one who could have made you realize it. Am I correct?”

“About enough things. But he didn't hurt me. He didn't have time.” She touched her neck. “I killed him. I didn't mean to. But Mute makes things for the powerless. Kraken wants to... parade her around in front of his rich friends.”

Such a stupid, hyperbolic explanation.

“Then why are you working for him?”

“I owe him. Same as you.”

She was tapping so hard it looked like a tic, and he realized it was selective — it had lapsed as she discussed Mute, returned when she mentioned Kraken.

“He's listening, isn't he?”

Molly gestured to her neck. “These aren't entirely aesthetic.”

“Has he got anything like that on me?”

“You? I think he respects you too much.”

After she had gone to wait outside the door, he checked the empty locker one more time. _You're so much more fun when you're ambitious, darling,_ read a plaintext file buried among the metadata. _Stay hungry._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> San Salvador was quiet in the way that only totalitarian cities could be. With a pair of faked corporate passports stamped by one of Irene's companions, Sherlock and Molly were untouchable.

Molly engrossed herself in another magazine. It was a different issue this time, maybe even a different title, but always the same faces, the same stories. It had been barely over a week since he had first met Kraken, and she still hadn't left. To be sure, it was an unusual circumstance, but she couldn't have had much of a life anyways, even if Kraken turned off the audio feed between jobs. She was quite clearly a spinster. He rarely saw her sleep either; she drifted as if in a state of culture-induced suspended animation punctuated by the rare destructive impulse.

A strange counterpoint to her genial and ever-active employer, he thought, and wondered why he had hired her. The trick at ArchoNews was worth it, perhaps. Or maybe he just didn't need to pay her. Or maybe, he decided, he had underestimated the importance of unflinching, staid loyalty to a mercurial and (not to him, but surely to others) incomprehensible man. He ought to know something about that.

Molly interrupted his thoughts. “Mr. Kraken wants to speak with you,” she said. “He's here.”

“At the door?”

She shook her head. “I'm here, Mr. Holmes. My body's out for the moment, but Molly can do in a pinch. She doesn't mind.”

“Then who have I been talking to?” He should have expected it, but somehow it came as a shock that the man he'd met had been manufactured somewhere. “Never mind, I know. He's too well-toned to be a thinking person anyways. You got yourself a pod body.”

“Polite, as always. My own body has grown... unruly, but I can't bear to give it up. I was always ugly anyways, though, and plastic surgery can only do so much.” He looked pointedly at Sherlock's face. “My corporeal form resides at a clinic in Oklahoma. In any case, I wanted to introduce you to a good friend of mine.”

“How old are you?” Sherlock asked.

“Older than I look, but probably younger than you think. I'm no Charles Moran. Can we get to it?”

Sherlock nodded. Molly rose, but the voice was still Kraken's. “If you've never been to El Salvador, I apologize; it never was the same after the factories were set up. You'll still like this, though. And I think you'll find the company compelling.” She opened the door. “Hello, Irene.”

The woman outside made a show of yawning behind manicured nails, but it was difficult to see more of her behind a translucent gold screen. “Ugh, what time is it? Doesn't anybody ever sleep?”

“Sleep's for the weak, you know that.”

“Easy for you to say.” She cocked her head. “So this is him, oh? He looks different from the papers. Still skinny, though. I like that.” She waved. “Nice to meet you. Irene Adler.”

What he had taken for a screen was actually a sort of hyperchromist kimono, its surface alive with tiny, stylized geisha and samurai. Only her hands and face were visible, both overlaid with a soft virtual dust. A rough, old-fashioned face and slim, smooth hands. The face was hers; the hands were almost certainly not. The kimono... who knew? He realized, jarringly, that he could tell almost nothing about her. Looking at her was like being blind.

She winked at him as she came inside. “Shy? I hadn't expected that.”

“Irene is friendly with some well-placed people in the junta. She shouldn't have any trouble getting you there or helping you find what you need once you've arrived.”

“Friendly... you flatter me,” Irene said. “I hurt them for money. The pay's not what it should be, but the connections are _invaluable_.”

Molly smiled. “So tactful. I see you two will get along. And I'm sure you'd like to say hello to Molly, Irene, so I'll leave you three.”

The women nodded to each other, and Molly settled into a chair. Irene rearranged the virtual folds of her kimono, scattering little men and women. She caught hold of a lute-playing girl, holding it between her fingertips. It struggled for a second, then lay still, allowing Irene's intruding thumb to pluck the strings of its unreal instrument.

“So,” she said, “What do you lot do for fun? God, Molly, don't you ever get out? You look even worse than last time.”

“I'm his bodyguard.”

“Oh, I bet you'd like to do more than guard it. Have you ever had a threesome?” Molly laughed. It sounded forced. “Come off it.” Irene briefly turned her kimono transparent, flashing a pair of stridently pink nipples. The gaudy sexuality, the flippant comments — it was an act, Sherlock gathered, but he was not sure to what extent Irene herself believed in it. So many people were unaware of their own thought processes.

***

San Salvador was quiet in the way that only totalitarian cities could be. With a pair of faked corporate passports stamped by one of Irene's companions, Sherlock and Molly were untouchable, and Irene had told them while landing that they would have no problems with Estrella's cabinet in any case. Not with her around. But if anything, that made the feeling more pronounced, giving Sherlock the feeling of being in a horror title, knowing nothing lasting would happen but unable to stop the motion of his own body.

A pair of silent children passed, their threadbare shirts emblazoned with the pin-and-insect logo of the Eldar Randall Large Quartet. Identical shirts, offloaded from some American aid program. Irene motioned towards a scuffed plastic bench. “Little Tokyo is a ghetto,” she said. “Buses won't take us there, and legitimate private cars have to report it all. We don't need the extra scrutiny.”

They ended up in a networked flatbed, its driver guided by a leftover military implant that covered half his face. His working eye wept slightly as Molly kept up a conversation in broken 'soft-aided Spanish. “He says he hasn't seen English in years,” she said to Sherlock. “After the embargo it's just Americans and Japanese.” The man pointed to his covered eye. “The Americans,” she said, “they almost killed him.”

“Would you mind letting me concentrate?”

She stopped short and spoke again to the driver. Of course they'd almost killed him — he'd been a communist, his implant one of the hundreds repurposed for some nonsensical mind-melding scheme. The correct thinking of the proletariat. He was lucky not to have died from the pain of no longer having directing voices in his head. Molly was foolish to sympathize, but obviously she would.

Would Mute be like these people? He wondered. She did not come off as foolish — in fact, she seemed if anything preternaturally intelligent for someone with so little formal training. But then, that was what other people had guessed, and other people were often wrong. No, Mute was educated, likely, her lack of obvious cultural markers either a front or an oversight. Male seemed more likely than female, English-speaking more likely than not. But that was all statistical. If he really thought about Mute, she seemed almost inhuman...

Molly paid the driver in a thick wad of devalued local currency mixed with American dollars. Stepping out, Sherlock looked bemusedly at the streets of Little Tokyo.

He was not sure what he had expected. He had seen holographs, but they somehow failed to convey the utter smallness of it, the topography its residents had somehow fit into what could only have been a few streets of ordinary size. The alleys went up only a few meters before being overgrown with apartments built off fire escapes, their residents smoking quietly in the glow of television screens. It was easy to see why the driver hadn't taken them further: no cars would fit on the streets, crowded as they were with carts and booths. The quiet of the city, too, was gone, replaced by the weary shouting of tiny women hawking bootlegged cassettes and vegetable protein. Molly tucked her fingertips carefully into her sleeves. Irene, on the other hand, had never looked more comfortable. She stretched her arms wide and shook out her hair as if breathing deep after a long time underwater. Without warning, she turned off, pointing to a tall warehouse with a lurid sign.

“A capsule hotel,” she said. “Always wanted to stay in one. But only here are the Japanese bastardized enough to let a woman do so.”

Sherlock snorted but followed Irene into the lobby, where they handed over a wad of cash for the privilege of three short foam coffins. The clerk handed them each a threadbare dressing gown and motioned to a side room. Inside, Irene stripped ostentatiously, cocking her shoulders so her breasts pointed upwards. She shrugged the gown over her shoulders, rippling the soft muscles in her arms. Molly turned away and changed into her own robe without a word, putting it on first and then pulling her clothes out from under it. The most Sherlock saw of her was a flash of scarred purple thigh.

“Aren't you changing?” Irene asked.

“Don't be stupid. Let's go.”

Molly paid the maid to overlook his attire and they went upstairs. Irene opened her capsule and drew the screen, leaving Molly and Sherlock alone. “Do you think we're going to find her?”

“It's obviously not a her.”

“What?”

“I was thinking. I've been thinking about this a bit now. Can you imagine the effort it would take to create one of Mute's pieces? The concentration? Now can you imagine that being created in a matter of months — less, probably, given the rate of Mute's output at times? It's impossible.”

“People say what you do is impossible.”

“I'm exceptional. Joson is — Joson was exceptional. But exceptional people are hard to hide. They get out. This, though — there's a reason Mute's so good at networks. We're looking at an entirely alien sort of intelligence.”

“You think it's a computer?”

“It's obviously a computer.”

“Why didn't you tell anyone else?”

Now that he thought about it, there were plenty of good reasons for him not to have done so. Donovan would have gotten more involved than she already was, and Kraken would have had his interest diminished, however slightly, by not having a figure to announce at society parties. But to be honest, he had really just figured it out.

Molly didn't wait for an answer, hoisting herself gracefully onto the capsule's edge. “You know, it's — funny,” she said. “I feel like I... know you. Better than I have anyone for a long time.” She edged her hand along the screen's bezel.

“Of course you do,” he said. “Between upkeep for your condition and your work for Kraken, I doubt you know much of anyone.”

“You're right,” Molly said. “You're right as usual. Do you get out much yourself, though? I guess you must, or else nobody'd be there to tell you how brilliant you are.” She slid into the capsule, fingertips pressed hard against the screen.

It was hardly the worst thing anyone had ever said to him. But it reminded him of John — hadn't he said the same thing, towards the end? Accused him of “keeping people around for validation,” that was it. He was wrong, as usual. People were useful. That didn't mean he had to like most of them. Well, John was probably wrong. He had every reason to expect thanks from people. Well... perhaps John was right in bare fact, but that was all.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The woman with the porcelain face was not who she seemed.

Irene went out in the morning for what she called a “bit of business,” leaving Molly with the name of a local informant. They took a pedicab to the street, Molly's 'soft language weak enough on grammar that she had to ask which it was three times. Sherlock doubted an outsider would have ever stumbled across it, but they eventually climbed a set of creaking stares to a door hung with paper signs, glowing strands making up a symbol that he couldn't read. Molly knocked.

A man answered the door, haggard and bleary-eyed. His thin jacket bore the junta insignia, its sleeves cut off roughly. He coughed, putting up a hand strapped with tubes and circuitry. “No,” he said. “No American.”

Molly spoke quickly and quietly, and all Sherlock caught was the magic word from Irene: _Omelas_. He dragged the door open, its back fortified with boards and corrugated metal, and backed through the equally improvised entryway to the room inside. He bowed slightly, indicating the woman on the bed, lit only by a plastic window. She was dressed in the conservative style of an American Orthodox sect, with the voluminous paisley and gleaming white of a Falwellite Virgin. Her porcelain face was molded like a tannenbaum angel, the sort that could be beautiful without being pretty. Through it, a filter stripped any edges from her voice, leaving it bell-clear and innocent.

“Hello?” she said crisply. In keeping with convention, the mouth didn't move. It was unsettling seeing her here, like a doll in a garbage heap. “What would you like?”

He flicked on the communication wire he shared with Molly. It was difficult to fully trust Molly when she said Kraken was not listening, but he had insisted. _The man is looking at us,_ he told her. _Keep your eye on him._

“I'm looking for someone near here with a computer. A big one — hundreds of megahertz of power and more storage than you'd see in any dozen consoles. Where could you put one of those here?”

“Right to the point,” she murmured, flicking a hair from the edge of her mask. “Would you like a drink?” She tipped a spoonful of orange powder into a cup and filled it to the brim with liquor, then offered it to him. “Afraid I can't imbibe, myself.”

Behind him, Molly tensed, but he took the cup and pretended to sip. The man was staring, if anything, more intently. “Your girl,” said the woman. “She needs to go.”

“It's all right,” Sherlock said. “Go ahead.”

“Your man goes too,” Molly said. “He comes with me.”

The woman nodded. They left, the man watching them even as he closed the door. _Call me when you need me back,_ Molly said. He leaned forward. “Now what do you have to tell me?”

“That's not the stage we're at,” she said coldly. “Secrets for secrets, love.”

“Irene told me this had been arranged.” It was not what he had expected. He had dealt with informants before, and they had a sense of propriety, of honor. They laid their terms out flat before one even got to the door, in great specificity.

“Irene doesn't know half the things she thinks she does.”

And they never used proper names.

Molly broke in. _Sherlock_ , she said. _Her bodyguard thinks something's wrong._

_Something is wrong,_ he replied. _Come back._

He heard a faint rattle. _Can't._

Dropping his glass, he pulled the woman's scarf back and the mask down, and found himself looking into the catlike eyes and unblemished face of Bastienne Moran.

“I see you've found the long con,” she said simply.

“Moran.”

She shook her head. “I'm only number five. We can't all be her.” Her face was strangely unperturbed, as if there were another mask beneath the first. So that was what she was, then. Number Five. Not Moran at all, but a copy.

“I thought they didn't allow clones off the stations.”

The woman smiled, a little sadly. “You'd have to ask her.”

She must have given instructions to them all, then: the woman too paranoid to trust anyone but herself. But Irene... Irene had vouched for the informant. Irene must have known.

“Am I going to leave here alive?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Probably not.”

He backed towards the door momentarily, but he was sure it would be locked from within as well. Five opened her mouth, but the voice Sherlock heard came from the mask itself.

“Put it back on, will you? It's so _creepy_ this way.”

It was unmistakeable. “Moriarty.”

“So you've met my lovely ladies.”

He took a breath. “Is this all a trap, then? No Mute, no sensitive, camera-shy girl genius?”

Moriarty somehow conveyed a shrug. “How should I know? I take opportunities where I find them. Did you really think I'd only _erased_ your data?”

Five's hands were trembling, her booted feet pushing at the drink he had spilled.

“What do we do now, then?” He was bored of this, tired of this petty obsession.

“The same thing we've always done, darling. We fight, and I think I've won, and I never do. You don't think I get sick of this obsession? Of never being able to quit you?”

Behind the mask, Five whispered something. “I don't want to do this.” She got louder, cutting off Moriarty as he started to speak. “I'll go back to sleep, I”ll be put to sleep. Just don't — just not like this.” Breathing hard, as if to stop herself from crying, she cried out for Bastienne.

“She isn't _here_ ,” Moriarty said.

“Get her for me. Let me speak to her one more time.”

Her foot was moving faster now, tapping and sliding with growing agitation. A pool of liquid slowly drained through a crack beside the bed. Everything went quiet. Sherlock watched, but it was all subvocal now, Five still clutching her floral skirt. The other hand reached up, behind her porcelain mask. There was silence. She rose, and Sherlock wondered what Moran had put in place for her, what senseless death she had consented to. Then, pulling a bottle from beneath the bed, she smashed at the window. Her mask slipped, and he saw the anguish on her face, even as the plastic shattered and she cleared it away with her hands. With a small wave goodbye, she slipped out, leaving pastel rags on the shards around the edge. He heard nothing from the mask after that, nor from the woman, but only screams from the people below.

Molly's voice sounded in his head. _Are you all right?_

_Yes,_ he said. _I'm fine. But our source is dead. Can you get in?_

He waited about fifteen minutes, until the asthmatic bodyguard had picked the door with a last-ditch override. He came in with Molly, who looked around the room dazedly. “I never should have left. It's the first thing you learn — never leave, even when they tell you to. I never should have. But you're all right.”

“I'm all right, yes. But Irene — she's betrayed us. And there never was any source. Maybe not even any Mute here. It's all just a trap.”

She shook her head. “No, that's the thing. When he told me something was wrong... he thinks that wasn't even his client.”

“He _thinks_?”

“Well look at her. How would you know? You know, if you weren't... you.”

She had a point, he conceded. Between the mask and gown there was little to go on. How long might she have gone on like this, if she really was impersonating some displaced fundamentalist?

“He told me that, well... he told me that he knew when she declined the drink. Did you wonder why there was so much around? The woman — well, not the woman, the other woman — she's an alcoholic. She'd no more be able to offer you something the way she did than cut off her own arm and hand it over. The real woman: she must have gone out and never come back.”

She swallowed hard. The man sat on the bed, his head in his hands. “I told Kraken while we were trying to get in. He's checked Irene... she's turned off her wire, client says he hasn't seen her. She's disappeared.”

There was a moment in which no one said anything. The man made a choking sound in the back of his throat.

“So what do we do?”

He wasn't entirely sure, he supposed. He had no doubt that Moriarty had removed their real source permanently — it would just be one more dig, another way to stop him from doing what he needed. Would the source have even known? Well, certainly, maybe. She'd have had enough information to put what he needed into context, enough that he could fill in the blank bits like the holes in an abandoned crossword puzzle.

The bodyguard opened the door, one hand over his eyes.

“Stop!” Sherlock didn't know how much the man understood, but he turned and looked. “Molly,” Sherlock said, “Ask him if he had a link to her.”

She spoke briefly, and the man replied. “Yes,” she said, “one-way — like mine. He can't reach her. He can't reach either of them. He says he still feels the... lack.”

Sherlock had heard of it, that syndrome suffered by augmented ronin. That sort of empathic connection worked on people, forging a peculiar one-sided friendship out of dependency. It was possible, he gathered, to need utterly someone who cared very little about you. Often precisely because they cared so little.

“And she spoke to him after... he guessed something was wrong?” Molly translated and the man nodded.

Then that was it. A daisy chain, all the way to Moriarty.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Aren't computers boring?” Moriarty asked beside him. “They only know true things.”

He had Molly calm the man and got him on the bed, laying beside him. He positioned the cables with more confidence than he felt. He'd done this, once, opening connections that were almost certainly less secure than these. He hooked in anyways, fumbling for the connection between the bodyguard and Five, and then through that, to the link that Five had with Moriarty...

When his body had adjusted, he realized just how expensive the latter was. The place he saw was almost photo-realistic, or at least illustrated-realistic, and undoubtedly private. No public space could support this level of detail. A doorman bowed to him, heels clicking on the impossible marble. “Might I take your coat?”

He stopped, hearing the emptiness in the man's voice. AIs couldn't do inflection, even very expensive ones. There had been no security yet. That meant the doorman was almost certainly it. He attempted to let a part of himself slide beneath the interface, bypassing the doorman to work directly with the underlying code. The world looped for a moment, froze, trapping him in limbo. He returned, frustrated, and the doorman made a show of not having noticed.

These things did not respond to tweaks, then, to codes. They understood only form and knowledge. AIs saw the nature of things, and only that. If the structure had been loose, he could have dropped down and corrupted it somehow, made it more human and more fallible. But up here, Sherlock could not change his nature the way he changed his face outside.

“Aren't computers boring?” a man asked beside him. “They only know true things.”

Sherlock turned.

“But you were going to say that too, weren't you? Maybe humans aren't so exciting either.”

Moriarty looked up at him. Sherlock was long beyond replying, beyond particularly caring about his games. “Would you like to come in?” Moriarty asked.

Sherlock let the doorman take his jacket and followed Moriarty up the steps. There was no roof inside, only an endless and starless sky. Light came from the trees, whose bare branches curved towards the surrounding emptiness.

“Do you think it would go better with snow?”

“You don't seem surprised to find me here.”

Moriarty sighed. “I'm always happy to see you,” he said. “But it's so rare you take me up on the invitation.”

It was pointless, Sherlock thought, to chart where exactly a given plan became improvisation. Moriarty took things as he found them, pretending he'd known all along. The man looked straight into his eyes. “Did I destroy you all that time ago? Just a little?”

“That was the part that was weak.”

Moriarty examined his nails conspicuously. “Machines aren't the only ones who can find a lie. And... if you lie... have you ever had black ice burn? It eats a little bit of you every time.”

“How long do we keep doing this? You don't get bored of it, these stupid games?”

Moriarty stiffened. “Don't you remember what I said last time?”

Sherlock realized he did. He had asked the same question, and Moriarty had answered breezily: _When one of us is dead, of course._

“Ahh,” Moriarty said. “Now you do. What does that tell you?”

“That... one of us does not leave here.”

Moriarty laughed hysterically, his face squeezing into a rictus. “No, darling,” he said. “It tells you that I'm a liar. You know what this place is?” he raised his hands to the empty sky. “It's a mausoleum.”

“Where are you really?”

“Really? Really? I'm exactly where I left myself, with a great bleeding hole in my head. But isn't it” he paused “ _fun_ here?”

Sherlock turned back. The steps had disappeared, and the edge of the world was apparent, dropping into nothing. This was it, then — no way to back out now.

“You know what I'd wanted, before?” Moriarty said. “I'd wanted you _alone_. Bereft of your admirers and one-sided infatuations. Stripped down to what you _really_ are. Stripped down to only strength. But you know...” he was holding a cigarette now, taking a long, dramatic drag. “It's always the complicated plans that go wrong. Right now I'd settle for just having you _here_ , alone.”

“I would die before living in this... ersatz world.”

Moriarty shook his head. “No... no, that's what you think you'd do. That's what everybody thinks they'd do. But whatever you want to say now, you went out and came back just like me. I don't know what you remember, but it looks like you were just as frightened of the long sleep as I was.”

“I faked it,” Sherlock said. “I thought you did too.”

“Oh?” the cigarette was gone, Moriarty looking almost coquettish with his quizzical smile. “You're sure?”

It was a plausible lie, but Moriarty should have known better than to try to sow doubt. “Ask Mycroft.”

“That's certainly fair, but... have you? Because it's difficult for even him to fake the sale and removal of most vital organs.”

“He's my brother. We speak.”

“Ohhhh...” he giggled. “You're usually better with people than that, aren't you? You like to pretend you're not... sure, of course you do. But you've built an entire persona on being too bright to care for anyone. You expect me to believe you've checked up? Tchkh.”

He opened his mouth to protest.

“Oh, but Mycroft — you did see him once, didn't you? He told me about it. We kept in contact white a bit, after I gave you to him to put back together.” That got the first genuine smile. “Did you ever write him, like he asked?”

It could easily have been guessed. But his own fuzziness on the events bothered him, and he had no way to counteract the nagging suspicion he felt. He could only play along, construct an alternate version of the events he believed to be the truth. Here it was:

He had dropped himself from a balcony, only to be caught, a brain-stemmed and heavily illegal clone (though not so much as Moran's Five) landing in his place. That much would be true all around. But Moriarty had known. He had not been picked up by Mycroft's men, but by those of his enemy, who made short work of his mind and organs. He had been killed. And then — regret, loneliness, remorse. Some combination of the three. Or simply a need for money. The men had sold him back, some copy of him that was — clearly — as good as the real thing.

Mycroft had bought it — well, of course he would have. He wanted his brother, after all. But the body, well, that was gone. Plastic surgeons may have done a good job on somebody, but it wasn't him, only his consciousness, fused to some alien body like a cuckoo in its nest. Who would he have eaten to stay alive? Well, maybe a clone. Maybe a dead man. Mycroft had dozens of options. And then he would have pretended nothing had happened, that it was just like old times. An old theater. A plea to keep in touch.

Except that none of it was true. Mycroft would certainly have kept a thing like this secret, of that he had no doubt. But Sherlock knew he would have figured it out. He would have felt... he would have felt not himself. Even if this was him, had always been him. Because if this were true, he was only a copy of a man who had died a year ago.

“Oh, but I know what you're thinking,” Moriarty said. “Yours isn't an ersatz world, just an ersatz person. You'd die if you were me, right? You'd die if you didn't have your brother's wealth and connections to protect you?” He bowed, sweeping an arm to the edge of the world. “Well, you're on your own now. Be my guest.”

Sherlock took a step into the darkness. He would not see anyone again, he supposed. His tenure as a consultant had been plagued by disaster in any case. That was the way he liked it, and as Kraken — whoever he was — said, only the mediocre lived lives of happiness. _Fuck that_ , he thought. He had been exceptional. From somewhere distant, he felt pain: the black ice, he supposed. A warning. He kept walking. Then, from somewhere further, he felt light.

It was difficult to describe, but the darkness felt warmer, less empty. Moriarty didn't seem to have noticed, his mask of a face undisturbed. And then he heard the voice: _Are you the one who wants to meet me?_

He knew immediately who it was. _Yes_ , he whispered. _But you need to help me_.

_I know that_ , she said. _I want you to remember it, because I want you to go home._

She was offering him something he should not refuse, and he knew it. But he had nowhere to go, nothing to do but finish his work. It was what he was meant for, whether he was himself in body or only in mind. It didn't matter. _I'm not leaving until I find you,_ he said to the darkness, and the darkness nodded back.

It said nothing, but Sherlock guessed that it had known he would ask that as well. He turned back to see Moriarty still watching. “Coming or going, darling?” he asked, but all the expression had gone out of his face, as if he were tired of playing a part, as if he only wanted to see some dull task to conclusion. He fixed Sherlock with a sullen stare. “I almost wish you'd leave, you know. You couldn't imagine what it's like — to have only one thing to think of. It would almost be better to have nothing to think of at all.”

Mute was silent. He had expected some grand gesture of her: that she'd sweep the whole place in a ring of fire, lift him up to some cliched paradise. Maybe, he thought, she was more subtle than he'd thought — though not by much. After all, it wasn't much more original to posit that God helped those who helped themselves. Or to require a leap of faith.

He wasn't sure what he had thought ice would feel like, but it was worse. A sharp, clean pain — that would have had a kind of grandeur. Not this numb, drunk, stupid feeling. _Faith_ , he told himself. Not in Mute, but in his own assessment of her. It was hard to think, so he locked his mind into a single thought: keep walking. Moriarty said something behind him, and Sherlock thought for a second that he should say goodbye. What a strange thing to think. And then, before everything went black: _This must be how other people feel._


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mute's voice sounded still and muffled: _Do you really want to know? About John?_ "I think," he said. "I think I do." _Would you go back if you knew he was still waiting?_

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock blinked. He was back in the clinic, shoulders cold against the table, and if he turned to either side he would see the dead. Molly was calling him, so she could take him out and Kraken could let him prove that he was still alive...

“Sherlock?”

That wasn't right. He didn't have to prove anything: he had won, after all. Moriarty was dead. He was alive. He was alive again.

“Sherlock, are you all right?”

Someone was touching his face. He sat up abruptly, and he wasn't in the clinic, he was on the floor of Five's apartment and the only sound besides Molly's voice was the shouts of police below. He could not understand them, but he knew instinctively that the cadence of their voices meant they had only just arrived. Relief: he was still capable.

“I'm fine. Shut up. We have to find Mute.”

“Yes, we... I was waiting. Do you want to go now?”

“What do you mean? Did she say something?”

Molly shook her head. “No,” she said. “You did.”

He expected to have to ask her what he'd said while under — hammering home his vulnerability seemed like the sort of thing the artist would do. But as he stepped outside, he felt a ghost-recognition of the city, and he knew which way to go. “Molly. Hail a cab.”

A monstrously augmented girl with the hair of a cafe hostess carried them to the edge of Little Tokyo, where the decoupaged buildings fell away and were replaced by dull, closed-up towers topped with gaudy insignia. Some of the multinationals were there, the hard and vicious K/G for Kang-Graves and TriOptimum's flattened shield. Between them lay half-dead national industries filled with design language from another decade. He directed Molly to tell the girl to stop, letting them out beneath a flowing cursive _Frigidex_.

“Is this it?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said. Molly didn't ask him how he knew. Her face was tight and pale, lank hair just starting to show the grease of travel. It was partly from today's events, evidently. But he also sensed in her a hesitation to complete this journey. He ignored it and directed her towards a metal grate; she knocked it open with her bag.

They stepped into a peeling hallway, the heat of outside settling around stacks of rotting papers and upholstery. The floor was undisturbed; they were the first to enter in some time. It could mean there was another door... or it could mean that Mute – if it or she was there – was entirely self-sufficient.

Molly opened the door at the end, her hands sharking. “Hello, Mute,” she said finally.

The girl was tiny, and could have have been an old-looking eight or a young-looking twenty-nine. Her hair had a brittle gray cast to it, and despite the heat of the room she was wrapped in taped-up down jackets and ragged fleece. Even her hands were mittened, though he could see little of her in the blistering dark.

The girl didn't respond. “Her name is Mute. Why would she speak?” Sherlock said.

“Wouldn't precisely be the biggest surprise we've had.” Sherlock ignored her. “Do you understand me?” She gave a curt, offhand nod. “Can you write? Do you have a console?”

The girl wasn't listening, and her eyes closed. Instead, Molly spoke.

“She's requesting permission to access my link. A finger command.”

“Well, accept it.”

“She already has.” The voice wasn't Molly's, and it wasn't Kraken's. It didn't even particularly match the girl before them. Otherworldly, if he needed to describe it, and somehow _off_.

“Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “The man who doesn't enjoy my work.”

He caught his breath. “That's right.”

“But you want me to come with you.”

“It doesn't matter. If you don't come with me, my employer will come to you.”

“Why?” He caught a sudden, childlike inflection in her voice, a questioning that he hadn't heard before. _Don't you know already?_ He almost asked. But he was able to catch the answer she would surely give. _Of course,_ she would say. _But I want to hear it from you._

Anything he could respond with would sound stupid here, he could already tell. He chose the safest option. “He wants to make you famous.”

The girl nodded, though the voice still came from Molly. “The only part of me that's important is already famous. I don't need your employer. And him: do you ever wonder who he is?”

Of course he did. He didn't believe she knew, though — Kraken's multifarious body defied clarification.

“Do you know why he wants to meet me? He's let you assume that he's some sort of _nouveau riche_ , and to some extent that's correct. But he would do a great deal to keep the public away from the things he has really done. Would he risk this in order to meet me?”

What he had really done... who knew what that was. Likely as not Mute was bluffing, that she had no more idea who Kraken was than he did, and that even if she did, he'd done nothing more sinister than any powerful man. Even so, he hesitated.

“I would have to ask him.” He disliked the girl intensely, for a moment. Then he realized that he did not particularly care. The case was done. Mute had been found. It was no matter to him whether Kraken obtained her in the end. “You won't meet him?” he asked once more, for form's sake.

“I know everything I could need to know about him,” she — or rather Molly — said quietly. “I have watched him as you tracked me, picked his data from between the lines of your data links and recordings. I have seen what he hopes to do, how he hopes to overwrite his legacy. He is not a bad man. But is anyone, really? At least until you turn your back on them.”

His eyes had adjusted now. He looked around the room and saw, for the first time, Mute's full form. The coats he had taken for protection may have been as much for propriety. Her body melted into the darkness, its soft curves merged with the cold of silicon and metal. Her hands, resting on the sides of the chair, sat atop a bundle of slate-gray wires. The edges showed traces of ragged flesh.

“Do you recognize what I am?”

Sherlock stiffened. “Joson was brilliant,” he said. “It's wasted on you.”

The girl smiled.

“She... she says that's all she's going to say to you,” Molly told him now. “It's funny — I've been giving up my voice to people for years. She's the first one who's ever asked.” She shook her head when Sherlock opened his mouth. When she spoke again, it was in blind repetition of some unheard voice.

She had many things to tell her, Mute had said. The identity of Mr. Kraken, the nature of his works. Whether they were worse than those of the callous Morans, the depraved Moriarty, the cupid Julia Graves. What Mute and Joson had in common, and how the knowledge of the machine had descended on them both. So much to know — so many questions that would be answered but never spoken. Molly's eyes glowed. The measure of a life, Mute said, the motivations of the long-dead lover's friend who had come after the crucible. All the knowledge Irene or Sherlock could have ever sought, stored forever not to be hoarded, but to be _used_.

“What are they, then?” he asked impatiently. “What are the answers?”

Molly hesitated. She took a breath.

“What are they?”

“She says they're not for you.”

He waited, expecting elaboration. None was forthcoming.

“That's fine,” he said at last. “It's nothing I can't figure out.” He was not at all sure that this was true, but there was nothing more to be said. He turned to go.

“Wait.”

“What?”

There was something, she said, something to be said to him alone, but only if he wanted it.

“Yes?”

Would John have left you if you'd stayed? Did he wait for you to come back?

He smiled a little. “I see.”

What does she mean? Molly wanted to know. He ignored her. Mute was waiting, the oracle who could see all and wanted nothing for herself. The being, it seemed, both of pure knowledge and maudlin emotion. She can tell you, Molly said. Just touch her.

Sherlock peeled the half-mitten from her overgrown hand. Its abscesses were filled with wires, an equally grotesque inversion of Bobby Joson's flesh-encrusted machinery. Shuddering slightly — a pointless animal reaction — he found a coiled microsoft input and plugged it in.

It was very quiet, suddenly tranquil. A place he recognized from Molly's imperfect description as the beginning of the crucible. But it was not water, he thought. He was sinking in oil.

Mute's voice sounded still and muffled. _Do you really want to know? About John?_

_I think_ , he said. _I think I do._

_Would you go back if you knew he was still waiting?_

It was a moot point, and he did not need Mute to tell him so. But if it weren't, if he were there...

He couldn't go back. He had made the logical choice, the only logical one. To return would be mawkish.

_Yes_. His imaginary voice broke. _In an instant._

It was warmer, hard to breathe. He felt something in his lungs and tried to cough it up, but it fluttered and fell, the effort causing him to gasp in even more. It did not, somehow, affect his voice, or his capacity to listen.

_Then I'm sorry,_ Mute said. _No one waits forever. Is there anything else you want to know?_

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, his eyes burning. _Why won't you tell me what you told Molly?_

_Because you irritate me._

_Is Moriarty gone?_

_No, but he thinks that you are. He was already mad, but now he is empty. He will not last long, and without him, Bastienne Moran will not touch you. You're free — insofar as you can ever be._

_Am I dead?_

_Do you want to know?_

He had asked the question without a second thought; now, he realized how much he feared the answer. If he weren't, it was just another lie. But if Moriarty had told the truth... then there was no one he could trust, not even himself — he wouldn't even have figured it out, but relied on the word of his enemy and a shell of a woman in an abandoned factory.

_No._

The fire burned hotter, and he was in strangely cerebral agony, but he kept the microsoft slotted. It felt appropriate for things to end like this, surrounded by empty space in the dark of a third-world supercomputing facility. He might never find out who Mute was, but he felt almost as if he knew her.

The fire faded out, and his connection faded. _One more thing_ , Mute said as he became aware of Molly behind him. _He may not have waited, but that doesn't mean he doesn't remember you._

He shook his head and unplugged the wire. “Kraken can do what he wants,” Sherlock said. “It's an ultimatum to him, not us.” They stepped outside together, leaving Mute to her dark reflections.

Kraken chose not to go after her. Sherlock took his money but refused his offer of further jobs. Even had there been anything the man could have used to tempt him, for once he did not feel like working. Before she left, Molly hugged him, somewhat awkwardly.

“Look me up sometime,” she said.

He never saw Molly again.

For the next week, he holed up in a cafe, scanning news feeds, remembering none of them. He knew what he was there to do, but it was so difficult to complete it. Finally, he queued the official directories for military and medical staff. By the fourth cup of tea afterward, he knew what he was looking for. He took a shuttle to central London, to a quiet practice unlike both the cheap clinics and Kraken's luxurious hospital. The nurse at the front desk looked at him through tinted lenses.

“Hello,” he said. “Would you put me through to Dr. John Watson?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it! Thanks for anyone who's borne with me this past month, and now it's time to get back to my other projects, which do not involve meticulous pastiche of a decades-old genre. I'll rather miss this.


End file.
